LETTER FROM LONDON light began to change (looking north from the French side is more dramatic than lookIng south from the English), and when you waved at the rare passing ships as violently as if you were on the Raft of the Medusa. Finally came the slow approach of the French coast, a twist of apprehension in the stomach, a strip of unpopulated sand, a cliff-top church no doubt dedicated to some protectress of fishermen, anglers on the breakwater looking up as your swell annoyingly disturbed their floats, then the creak of damp ropes pulling tight, and the sudden anticipation of your first French smell-which turned out to be a mixture of coffee and floor disinfectant. This sense of transition, of a psycho- logical gear change, a necessary pause, survived until quite recently, when a new generation of ferries actively undermined the experience. They were much larger, for a start, yet, paradoxically, the more passengers they carried, the smaller the deck space became: just a couple of thin strips as a walkway for claustrophobes. So your sense of the sea now came double- glazed. Secondly, these big boats were much more stable, which reduced the amount of vomiting. No doubt this helped ticket sales, but vomiting (and the sight of others doing it) was an impor- tant endorser of transition. Thirdly, the ferries became entertainment centers and emporia: things nowadays are not so much shipshape as shopshape. The mod- ern cross-Channel passenger no more voyages to enjoy the sea than the illegal gambler goes to an offshore casino to admire coral growth. Ferry companies routinely offer one-pound return tickets to standby foot passengers, and as Hoverspeed spokesman Nick Stevens put it, "The crossing of the Channel becomes immaterial. It is an alternative to the High Street." The boats have turned into thrumming bazaars crammed With bus- ding, whooping discount seekers: put the concept of the bargain next to the concept of booze and the British (as Chanteclair would understand) become overexcited. So the experience of transition has deteriorated in recent years. You do not have to be anti-European or xenopho- bic to like the idea of the frontier. On the contrary: it seems to me that the more Europe becomes integrated com- mercially and politically, the more each nation should confirm its cultural sepa- rateness. (The French were quite right in the recent GAIT negotiations to hold out for the "cultural exception" in the matter of government subsidies: that is why they have a film industry, and we have only a collection of cinematic in- dividuals. ) Frontiers are therefore useful. It is good to be reminded that over here is the place you are leaving, where you come from, while over there is the place you are going to, where you don't come from, and where things are done differendy. It's one thing to know this, another to be made to feel it. There wasn't much to be en- joyed about border crossing in the old Eastern Europe, but one thing they always did well was make you feel alien. You do not come from here, the men in strange uniforms implied, and because of that we view you with suspi- cion: you are guilty until proved inno- cent, and here you will not find that va- riety of warm beer you like to drink at home. I remember crossing from Poland into Russia with a vanload of fellow- students in the mid -sixties, and being compelled by the Russian border guards to destroy the tiny quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables that we had with us: in other words, our dinner. It seemed poindess and bullying at the time, but in retrospect had a grim usefulness: no, it said, this is no longer Poland, the rules are different here. At about this time, a friend of mine took a holiday in Albania. Puritanical by nature and not unsympathetic to the Tiranë regime, he deliberately had his hair cut before departure so that he would not be judged a decadent hippie. I had never seen his hair so short; but at the entry point from Yugoslavia they took my friend off the coach, sat him in a wooden chair by the customs post, shaved off what crinal remnants they could find, and charged him a few far- things for the putdown. There is not much chance of getting a cheap haIrcut out of Eurotunnel. In- deed, from now on your passage from England to France will be sweetly unpunctuated unless, say, you are a Rastafarian smoking a joint the size of a baguette and driving a car wIth Co- lombian number plates. OtherwIse, your journey will go like this: you turn up at the Cheriton terminal whenever you 45 like, buy a ticket at the toll booth, pass through British and French customs with a couple of flaps of your passport, and drive onto one of the double-decker shuttle carriages. Your thirty-five-minute translation to France will be an austere experience: no smoking, no bar, no shops, no duty-free, though you will be allowed to leave your car and visit one of the lavatories, which are placed in every third carriage. It will also be an austere experience spiritually: first reports indi- cate that your ears may not even pop to remind you of where you are. You will not see the White Cliffs of Dover as you leave or the Bassin du Paradis in Calais Harbor as you arrive; indeed, you will not spot water at any time. Then you will emerge into a French marshalling yard and roar off, unhindered by any authority, toward the autoroute and that rented holiday cottage in the Dordogne. In 1981, when the Humber Bridge was opened, a cantata was performed with words by the poet Philip Larkin. In his closing stanza he described the bridge as Reaching for the world, as our lives do, As all lives do, reaching that we may give The best of what we are and hold as true: Always it is by bridges that we live. This is what most people feel, or would like to feel. A grand projet should inspire, should stun us into reassessing our place and purpose in the world But perhaps the Channel Tunnel has come too late to do this. Imagine if it had been built a century or more ago, before Blériot flew the Channel, before radio and television. Then it would have been a marvel: it might even have changed his- tory, instead of merely adjusting it. What we have now, though, is the ultimate nineteenth-century project completed just before we enter the twenty-first cen- tury. So it is a convenience, something to be thankful for, as impressive as a fine new sweep of motorway. And it will still be there on that distant, perhaps apocry- phal, day when the British finally get over their complicated and self-destructive feelings about the French, when they de- cide that difference does not logically en- tail inferiority, and when Little England- ers, tabloid journalists, and John-of- Gaunters line up at Folkestone with a chanson in their hearts to bellow invitingly dQwn the Tunnel's mouth, "Froggy! F roggy! F roggy! In! In! In!" . {'lZ\ -.L( " I